


Of Bees And Bones

by damaraine



Category: Homestuck
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-11-26
Updated: 2012-11-26
Packaged: 2017-11-19 15:43:00
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,419
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/574916
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/damaraine/pseuds/damaraine
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>in which Sollux and Aradia do a little digging, grow up a little, spend an inordinate amount of time talking about drones and declare themselves in a pale quadrant [with mixed results, and no one gets laid]</p>
            </blockquote>





	Of Bees And Bones

They had met at the schoolhive, when they had just about outrun grub hood but had not yet said farewell to their feral roots. Crouched in corners, they did their best to honour the troll traditions of 'learning' and 'comradeship' through snarling and squabbling and baring their teeth at their peers.

Well, most of them, anyway.

By all accounts, Sollux was an early bloomer. Even in his youngest sweeps, he found it less edifying to fight with tooth and nail as his companions did than to combat with words or telekinesis and then run. As it turns out, insulting their lusus and sprinting away was the better way to brawl if you didn't want to lose any teeth. Therefore, he did not spend his lessons lashing out at people at their feet, and it gave him the smallest amount of grief that he was likely the only person with the dignity to stand up straight in their entire cursed grubhatch. (But not really, he enjoyed how much taller it made him than the rest of them.)

He did not reside in the schoolhive for very long, and probably would have attended for an even shorter period had it not been for a certain arrival. (After all, he could satisfy any desire for education he might possess by wrangling with computers and fiddling with codes.) She weaved her way between the writhing messes, speculating on whether they were supposed to be her classmates or whether they were some kind of new population control ploy brought in from off planet locations.

This was something that she and Sollux had in common. He might have remarked upon it when she came and sat next to him on the crude wooden block that functioned as a desk, an armchair, and apparently a place to seek higher ground from the blight affecting their classmates he usually folded himself into. She asked him what their deal was, as if they had been friends since hatching. He mumbled something about "the degeneration of the brains of young troll kind" meekly, as if that was true. 

She fiddled about with her fingers and feet, humming at a low frequency. It was kind of irritating, Sollux thought, but he preferred it to the growling noises creeping closer to his feet. The teacher arrived, a troll barely 8 sweeps, with the pithy, irritable attitude of someone hoping to avoid culling through good deeds, to no avail. He started rattling on about Alternian homophones and other things that were as Greek to the majority of the class as the word Greek itself.

She continued to fiddle and fret over things that were not there - namely, ghosts that might have noticed her absence and even more blatantly, any previous education. But Sollux wasn't to know that, the former, at least. And it didn't really concern him; he was merely glad that she did not concern herself yapping or biting.

Although his only evidence of intelligent life forms existence still on this planet, she had trouble writing her own name. That giant contradiction there kind of bothered him at the time. So he set about his ways to remedy that.

"My name's Aradia!" she whispered, possibly the first person to ever to enter that room and be excited to learn. She had a tangle of dark hair that all seemed to be trying to go their own separate ways, and giant, hypnotic eyes. Something ruddy and rouge was  blooming under her cheeks; perhaps it was enthusiasm, more likely it was where she had been kneading her hands into her cheeks, puzzling over whether there was a backwards Alternian double w in 'Aradia'.

"Mine's ... Sollux ..." he said, trying to mask his lisp but just making it more noticeable.  When she heard it, she laughed and laughed at him, because she was four sweeps old and had never heard anything quite so silly. She didn't even care that she was being ridiculously loud, and neither did anyone else because schoolhives didn't start kicking their totalitarianism into them until next sweep.

Sollux did not learn much that day - but that was the case d'habitude for Sollux and schoolhives. He did, however, make a friend, and that didn't happen normally. That hadn't happened at all. Not before, at least. Before he hadn't cared.

They walked home as far as they could before they had to split down separate paths. Another boy, with horns that would one day grow into a real rack was twiddling his thumbs in wait. Aradia went up to him and patted his lusus, who was hovering over his shoulder as any responsibly guardian should to their four sweep old. Or at least, a guardian that was not chained to the ceiling or had tendrils that weighed more than it’s combined weight strapped to it’s head.

"Hey, you really get around," Sollux gathered up his courage and yelled in her direction.

"Hey, you almost sound normal!" she yelled right back at him.

Sollux walked away with an inexplicable, satisfied grin on his face.

~

Aradia was staring up at the sky, her eyes reflecting the blackened clouds. She was smiling triumphantly at nothingness, and nothingness was probably smiling right back at her. The horizon was devoid of hives, trees, and it had no significant landscape to speak off. Just flat, flat, flat, for everywhere around. She could feel the draught weave around her ankles and tinker with her hair, but it didn't bother her. She had an adventure set between her temples and there was no letting go of it until it had been carried out to the upside down Alternian T.

It might have been an ambient moment if Sollux hadn't chosen that very moment to open his mouth and whine.

He spoke of drones, which at that time where still a vague concept solely equipped with plasma shooters and alarms that would bleep if you attempted to flee. Vanilla and modest they may have seemed, he did not want to stick around. She called him a coward but he persisted, maintaining that it wasn't safe.

She lost her patience, as she did quite a lot back then.

"Oh, Sollux, don't be a coward! You aren't any safer in your hive than you are here! Just because there are walls it's not going to stop them from blasting them down and waving their beepers or blasters or whatever it is they have in your face! So stuff it up!" she snapped. He grumbled but went with it.

"Where are we even going?" he asked, as the boy who he had seen chauffeuring Aradia around fell into step with them. His name was Tavros and he was likely just as apprehensive about where Aradia was coercing them into going as Sollux was.

She smiled and tapped her nose, in a move that was likely supposed to emulate mysteriousness, but really it was just indicative of the fact that they would inevitably be walking thousands of miles to visit a rusty place where thousands had died. Which could feasibly be anywhere on Alternia. Sollux could just feel the excitement settling into his bones. Or perhaps it was arthritis. Either way, it was not looking forward to walking that far.

"So, uh, how many people died at this place?" Tavros asked. He didn't sound all that nervous for all of his verbal misgiving. He was even smiling, his crooked, pointy little teeth locked together. He might have seemed a little threatening if not for his scruffy little Mohawk.  Having all of your hair piled near might have seemed a little scarier if it didn’t invite your friends to put it up in ribbons. (It was Aradia’s fault and it had only happened once.)

"Yeah, I'll be pissed if we're not going to be assaulted by thousands of angry ghosts," Sollux added.

"Don't be snippy! You love the ghosts as much as they love you." She reprimanded them both.

"Could definitely tell that by how they tried to strangle me last time," Sollux mumbled towards his feet.

"Nonsense! They were just being friendly. _Honestly!_ With the amount of grumbling you'd do you'd have thought that you're the one who had been ferociously murdered,” she said, reasonable and chirpy as ever.

They had long since abandoned the schoolhive and Sollux was still trying to decide whether what they were doing with their time now was a better use of his time than what they had been doing before. (His feet, which were not used to walking so much and were resenting it bitterly, claimed they'd rather be back in the schoolhive studying imperial history or extermination of bloodcastes 101.)

For once, they didn't have to walk very far, even if the terrain had seemed endless from their vantage point. Aradia knew the trail better than she knew the curve of her own horns.

The place she took them was burnt out and just in the ground. The architecture might have been something to admire had it not been missing large chunks and carrying the flavour of heavily charred. Sollux could hear the chunks of glass that remained in the upper windows being whittled away by the wind. It grated on his ears and he didn't want to follow Aradia in when she went through a hole that might have been a door, once.

But he did and his horns grazed against the top of the wall as he entered.

Inside wasn't much more homely than the exterior invited him to think, but Aradia seemed to be having a good enough time of it. She was bounding up the stairs and rifling through whatever furniture that remained.

Sollux didn't much like exploring or archaeology; he considered digging around in dead people's possession lack lustre and the pretentious bullshit you had to drone on about learning after the fact to justify sticking your nose into their business was just as mediocre. But he would put up with it.

Aradia, on the other hand, didn't really feel the need legitimize any rifling, ransacking or grave robbing or anything. She had no trouble finding something as souvenirs. (Ardent though they might be with genocide and such, trollkind was not quite so good at clearing up after said genocide.)

In this instance, she found a shirt. She pulled it over her head and wrestled with her hair to get out of the neck hole. It smelled like mildew, felt damp, yet it bore no marks or tears. Black and bog standard, it swamped her.

"What blood colour is this, even?" She addressed to everyone in the room. Which were Sollux and the remains of the stairs. Tavros was outside, due not to cowardice but for lack of an appropriate entrance.

She could see quite clearly, and so could Sollux. It was a bright, electric green. They didn't know anyone with that colour blood. They didn't really know anyone above their social blood rackets. Aradia sat down on the floor, not to be deferred by the damp or the debris or anything. She mulled other everything she knew about people of that blood colour, which at that point was their existence, and that's about it.

"I don't think making your ass fall asleep is going to help you solve the mystery," Sollux said, on return

"Shush, you're ruining my ambience," Aradia muttered. She had just learned that word and she was going to wear it to death.

"Sorry, but I think Tavros got bitten by something and I've got to make sure my lusus hasn't pounded the fucking ceiling in."

"Fine, we'll go. Was the thing that bit Tavros big?" she asked, less out of concern than curiosity.

"Nah. But he turned bright beige and kind of got stuck that way so either it's serious or whatever it is that bit him stayed in his pants."

They both grinned and went to go and investigate.

 

~

 

"I am a bit disappointed that I didn't get to do any digging!" Aradia declared on their return trip. Her preferred method of travel, this time round, appeared to be bouncing, which made her trip over her feet and at that moment, fall on her face.

She took a moment to scramble up, but stopped in a crouching position, petrified by the droning of engines overhead. She turned her head up, and looked to the sky. Everyone did. Even the grass was being blown in that direction, by the wind, generated by the far off but presumably immense turbines.

The ship was hardly a speck in the distance, yet they could make it out clearly. They could see the colours reflecting on the window glass, and if they squinted, an unidentified mass of perplexed flesh through all of the seizure colours. As it drew closer, they saw that it was responsible for the blaze running rampant against the windows, eyes all red and blue, red and blue. A troll, tangled up in its own sinew.

Sollux stood transfixed long after everyone else had torn their eyes away and started formulating their escape. The hum of the engines made noises ring inside his head. His fingers wanted to fidget but they were stuck firmly at his sides; a sentiment that only spread to his legs as the ship neared.

He felt his arms being yanked on either side. As it turned out, collectively, Aradia and Tavros made up quite the muscle. They were doing that thing that everyone wanted to do when faced with a looming battleship. It might have been running, it could have been surrendering. He reckoned it was the former from the sensation of his feet grazing against the ground.

"Sollux.  Sollux! You're being a drama queen. And a coward! I thought we established earlier that that was against the rules! I don't see how some flashing lights made you forget that." Aradia's tone departed from her usual in how it was harsh, but most of all, how she sounded confused.

He just mumbled some shit. They probably weren't words, but the occasional vowel sounds could likely be found with some digging.

"That was, eloquent." Tavros commented. Eloquent was a long word and took him several tackles, but he got there in the end.

"Yeah, you try having a seizure and then trying to speak properly." Sollux spat. His lisp was more pronounced than normal.

"You didn't have a seizure, you seized up. Like I said, drama!" in her anger, Aradia sounded less hollowly cheerful than normal. For some elusive reason, it was nice.

He insisted that he could walk on his own, to which Aradia scoffed nonsense but let him go nonetheless. He walked like he had just shed his grubskin. He knew it was pretty pathetic, but he just didn't care enough to stop, fix his gait and walk like a man.

He could feel their eyes on him, and he didn't much like that. He could feel the urge to lash out building up in his fingers and staunch itself in his ankles, but he found that it was too much effort to humour it and let it go.

Tavros wandered away after a while to pursue a white speck in the distance that could have either been his lusus or a blinking snare trap. Aradia assured him that if the case was the latter, she would have his eternal soul backed up, and clicked her fingers and winked.

Sollux turned to take his path home, but Aradia grabbed his arm and gave him a look that told him that a lecture was in his future. Great, he thought. More forthcoming doom for him to enjoy. Just great.

But a lecture didn't come. She just grasped his hand and smiled.

"You've got to stay at my hive tonight! You spend too much time in that city and the air is all gross. And I've got a bunch of stuff to show you!"

"If that shit is skulls or insects, then I'll pass. We have all that in the city too, aa." Sollux smirked, but didn't quite let go of her hands.

"Yes, Sollux I know, I've been to your apartment and insects are definitely in abundance there," she grimaced. "Either way, you're coming with me!"

Aradia's hive was struck dead in the middle of nowhere, and her lawn was littered with patches that had been dug out in mock excavations. They had not yet mounted that odd, arbitrary wind thing on the roof, leaving it to be just yet another empty space for tumbleweeds to roll across in the entire destitute setting. He had hated the thing, and considered the whole construction process a waste of telekinesis but he felt vaguely in debt for blowing a hole in her roof in the first place.

It was far too humid to loiter outside, but inside, the walls only amplified the persistent noise of insects and did little to fend off the heat. So they retreated to the roof, just another empty space in the rural nowhere. Although the bug's incessant choir was more strident up there, but it was the best place to catch the thin breeze being tussled off faraway trees.

Sollux sat down next to Aradia. Civilisation shined in the distance where the stars did not, and the whirr of insects was beginning to sound like the whir of engines. He thought maybe he could block it out; after all, he was pretty good at wadding the physic cotton up in his ear. He lived in a city, and more recently, people had begun to appeal to his ears when they were not in the best of states. That was when he got the real cotton out.

But tonight there was no cotton, so Aradia's conversation, familiar and sparse, would have to suffice.

"Do you hear that?" she interrupted herself. Sollux felt himself go rigid, despite the fact that he could hear nothing but insects. She bounded up to the edge of the roof, which lapped at her ankles but had trouble reaching up any further. Sollux hadn't quite adjusted himself to her absence and fell flat out on his head.

Aradia cackled at him as he sprawled out on the roof, twitching. He was fairly sure that he could see the stars under which he was born and as nice as that was,  all of the spiders and beetles were congregating under his shirt. She laughed at him for that one.

Through her chortling, Aradia choked out the accusation "you totally thought it was a drone ah ha ha ha", which he did, but he'd much rather sit on his ass denying it petulantly.

The argument dissipated after a while and Aradia promised that she would protect him from the drones, with her hair, if necessary.

"Thanks. I have total faith in your hair, aa." he laughed. He hoped he sounded dry but it just sounded more earnest. Which it was, and he didn't really care. He didn't doubt it - her hair was as morass as the quintessential sea dweller's hideout.

"You should have nothing less! I'm expecting you and your bees to make an effort if I'm ever in trouble, by the way."

" ... Actually no, that sounds stupid. I think I'll just stick by my hair."

"Wow, rude. Do you really think that your hair can protect you from getting stung between your shoulder blades?" Sollux grinned.

"Well, considering that's kind of where my hair is I think so, yes."

They fell asleep to the sounds of insects and promises of proving themselves against drones that would never arrive.

~

The drone of engines did not go away with sleep. They did not go away with time, either, and they certainly weren't cancelled out by the drone of his everyday routine.

And it wasn't sticking in his ears; it was sticking in his eyes. They were practically buzzing. He had to wear sunglasses just to keep them from singing everything he looked at twice.

It wasn't the ship that he was afraid of. It was the colours he had seen in the window, red, blue and bright mustard yellow. He didn't want to be that; something trapped in a string of what used to be their own flesh, trapped behind a job that they didn't want and a reflective glass panel where you could see both the stars and your own undignified reflection.

Slowly but surely, Sollux was becoming one of those many young trolls that did nothing but complain about their bloodcaste and its subsequent standard of life. For whatever reason, Aradia had a hard time placating him. Every time she tried to make contact with him, she was drowned out in favour of engines.

Perhaps she was saying the wrong things. Apparently saying "get your head out of your butt, I just want you to be happy and you're not going to achieve that through making vrooom vroooom noises in your head!" proved more difficult than lugging him around to archaeological sites miles away from their respective dwellings.

Alas, the ever present possibility of frostbite and being attacked by ghosts or ruffians or highbloods far too vigilant of their territory did nothing to rub life into Sollux's monotonous bones. Aradia was far from dense, but empathy had only started to reveal itself as a concept recently, could not comprehend how this had not worked for him. It had worked well enough for her, when the moans of the deceased had first made their way to her ears with the news that she would be with them before long, and a friend, not her own shoddy blood would be the perpetrator.

But she wasn't concerned about that. Her own prophecies of doom were less of a priority to her than Sollux's were to him. And to her, too.

She'd be a pretty shitty morail if she didn't at least try to help in some other way than dragging him on weathered treks to place where blood had been spilled a very long time ago, but not so much recently. This time, a ruined castle hive.

What? A morail was a useful thing to have. Aradia was afraid of drones, too. She’d pitched the idea to him whilst he’d been vegetating on the ground of his hive, and since he’d given a grunt in response, she’d presumed it was a-ok. She’d learn better, later.

She ambled over to him, at his position as self-declared look out. She was finally beginning to understand that maybe, not all people liked to poke at the dust until they found something that had proved someone had died here. Indeed, she had previously believed that it was The Alternian Way. But right now it was different.

"Vrooooooooom-vrooooooooooooom," she whispered into his ear. Normally, "boo!" would have been her choice method of announcing her presence, but the shrill, girlish scream Sollux in response gave compensated for any inconvenient detours from normality.

She chortled as Sollux's nursed his injured dignity and eventually sat down beside him.

"Is that's what wrong? The buzzing?" Aradia inquired. She had no idea what it meant. Maybe his bees were finally getting to him.

Sollux just grunted, embracing the troll tradition of not talking about your feelings lest you had a plasma shooter pointed at your head. Aradia didn't have one of those, and her grubby lowblood hands would probably never even come within brushing distance of one of those. So she resorted to the typical reaction of her species: violence.

She didn't, actually. The journey had worn her out and if she punched Sollux, she feared that he would break.

"Oh, come on, Sollux! You've been in a terrible mood for about half a sweep. There's only so much sulking you can do before you lose all of your friends and die prematurely of loneliness." She reasoned.

Yet another grunt. Apparently a single derisive comment snorted through his nose or some kind of awful confession proved too taxing for him, which did little to dissemble Aradia's mounting concern. It only occurred to her that maybe her comments weren't exactly helping when her arm was swatted away in favour of a distinct buzzing in the background.

It really brought the reality of your in name only and only acknowledged on one side moraillegence when the other party was more interested in an insect than you.

She didn't really care. It was just another of the extensive list of things she was okay with. She walked off, a little disgruntled. The ruins hadn't withheld their previous glamour, and she just kind of wanted to go home and be batted in the shins by her lusus.

Mostly she was frustrated that this wasn't a situation that she could remedy with telepathy and hoards of angry ghosts. She reserved that tactic for vengeance and loneliness.

So, Aradia walked. She had lost herself in thought, and the local whispers from beyond the grave before she realised that she'd left Sollux behind, moping. He might be intolerable at the moment, but that would pass. Most things did.

After she retrieved him, he trailed along behind her dejectedly. The terrain was flat, and littered with the pockmarks of wildlife damage, or perhaps remnants of some old culling or war. You never could tell, and neither Aradia nor Sollux particularly cared to at that moment.

They had been walking for a long time when Aradia stopped hearing the sound of his feet. She turned to see whether he had been snatched by the supposedly hostile highbloods that were said to inhabit this area, in spirit and more armed forms. But no, those trolls would be no more than a singed pimple in the ground by now, and Sollux would be tying his tongue in knots trying to spit out the apparently fantastic one liner he'd thought up.

But no, he'd merely lost his footing and feel into one of the numerous holes that covered the horizon. Aradia moved to help him up but paused, mid gesture. A familiar sound came to them, carried on the wind.

Oh no, she though, inordinately dismayed by a little bit of buzzy reverb. Sollux was probably going to flip out or something. Or maybe he'd just crumble into himself even further. Neither prospect sounded particularly nice.

The drone of engines passed without the shadow of a ship passing over them. Aradia exhaled, and Sollux looked up blankly from the hole. He attempted a scrambled escape but Aradia wasn't about to allow that. Not over her dead body.

She sat on his feet and interrogated him while he couldn't squirm away.

"Are you going to tell me what's wrong, now? You've been such a drama queen lately, even more than normal! I've been very worried!" She declared, bouncing up and down a little. She had a little crack. His feet would be fine. He had like twenty toes on each foot or something.

When she was met with no response, she just yelled that she was going to stay put until she received a suitable reply.

"aa ..." Sollux choked out. He sounded like he hadn't spoken in a while. Which he hadn't, Aradia could testify to that. But she was so thrilled that he had spoken that she didn't care.

"Are you going to tell me what's wrong now or do you need me to pretend to be a swarm of bees or something?"

Sollux gave her a wry look. She continued to talk. Fast and irreverent to any purpose other than the words that would come from his mouth if she went on long enough.

It worked, though. His woes quickly turned into anger. He booted Aradia off his shoes and turned to grasp and claw at the air for a moment before turning back to her.

"Oh my god, ok! Enough! The buzz is a fucking metaphor, ok?" he said more with jerky hand gestures than words.  He immediately regretted that sentence. He hoped that his lisp would mangle the words beyond recognition.

Aradia was dumbstruck. She wouldn't put it past him to spend half a sweep contemplating the implications of his apparently metaphorical buzzing, but it seemed more like something that overly dramatic sea dweller neither of them particularly liked to hang out with than _Sollux_.

"That is ... actually the dumbest thing I've ever heard ..."

"Shut up! I'm not the one who wanted to see whether the most ruined place in walking distance on Alternia had like, a sock draw."

"Yes, Sollux, because the pursuit of knowledge is clearly dumber than moping around for a sweep about ... what was it? A metaphor?  Some buzzing?"

Sollux steered the conversation onto a different topic, for he knew that if he retaliated with something along the lines of is not, and then they would be at it all night. Ahh, lowblood stamina. Their live spans were short because most of their energy was spent not on growing strong and healthy, but arguing about who was stupider.

He took of his glasses and pursed his lips. His eyes were fairly placid today, just powerful enough to pluck a blade of grass off the ground and plant it in Aradia's hair. It did little to sooth her.

"Do you ever feel like you're doomed? Like, more doomed that a fucking candy coloured grub?"

"Yes, there are no more than twelve sweeps on these bones but it'd be just my luck if I ended up in the ground earlier than that," Aradia interjected. Sollux chose to ignore that.

"Also, if you say, "today it's just a piece of grass, but in one, two, three sweeps, IT'LL BE AN ENTIRE FUCKING SPACESHIP" I will be forced to bury you in that hole, and never come back for you. Ever." She continued.

Sollux chose to ignore that, too. It was exactly what he was going to say.

"Yeah, yeah, laugh however much you want, but it's true. The day I turn eight sweeps I bet they're going to come to my hive and be all like, yes Mr Captor, you're going to come with us and pilot this giant asslicking naval ship for us, and if you refuse --"

"We will pick you up by your scrawny limbs and bodily carry you there?" Aradia finished for him.

"Oh, come on, scrawny is harsh. Have you seen these fucking things?" Sollux flexed his arm, displaying his apparently impressive muscles. They were exactly one inch high and Aradia had a hard time discerning what was muscle and what was t-shirt.

"Well, if they do, then I'll beat them up for you! They don't stand a chance against me, with all of my GENUINE strength got through rifling through dead people's sock drawers." Aradia smirked, just a little.

Sollux raised an eyebrow, to which Aradia insisted _yes, of course, what are false morails for?_ And desperately prayed to their sweet, troll Jesus that he had not heard that. But alas, he had, for his eyebrow raised itself even further onto his head.

"You know, that pinkish quadrant? The 'I would literally be on the floor screaming about grubsauce if you were not here with me' quadrant? And I know you did that, because once I came to pick you up at your hive and that is what you were doing." she smiled. Mostly because she had seemingly successfully dug herself out of a hole, but partly because that was one of her most prized memories. Classic.

"And that automatically qualifies us for sketchy moraillegence, huh?" Sollux asked, bemused.

"Sure! I need you as much as you need me! You need my graceful soothing charms and my muscles and I need your scintillating conversation and slightly fleshy posterior, and we both need each other in case we're confronted by drones with buckets!" Aradia held her hand to help him up. All of that time, they'd been crouching in a hole. It did not bode well for their backs.

Sollux grasped that hand, and relapsed back into his regular slouching position.

"Okay."

She smiled, wide and happy and bright. That was how he would remember, big and bright and happy, when he woke up on her lawn with smouldering eyes and an aching head in circumstances that were less than ideal. He would try his best to remember when she trapped herself into a cold, hard tangle of wires and panels that did not quite make sense to his tempered eyes.

He didn't see it again after that, on account of being blind. But he knew exactly what to remember when he saw again, alive, and bright.

**Author's Note:**

> any incorrect use of troll terminology can be attributed to the fact that they do not, as far as I am aware, exist, and therefore cannot berate me for it. or do any worse, for that matter.


End file.
